consumer sex culture does Orientalism
The first Black Emanuelle collaboration between Laura Gemser and her Svengali Joe D'Amato is merely a taste of the shocking things to come in the likes of Emanuelle in America and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Emanuelle in Bangkok is a kind of dry run, with Gemser repeating her Black Emanuelle character from the first, non-D'amato film and D'amato finding his feet with this new character and genre he's lucked onto.Yet there are signs of things to come. The bulk of the film is sexual travelogue, with Emanuelle exploring Bangkok and then Casablanca, sightseeing and shagging but some of the sights she sees are not quite what they recommend in the Visitor's Guide to Bangkok (a cockfight, a snake loosing a bloody battle with a mongoose, a dancer who has a speciality act with ping-pong balls , guess where) and the sex becomes dangerous, as Emanuelle is gang raped by a battalion of the king's bodyguards. This last scene is the film's most contentious, as Emanuelle lies back, thinks of previous exhortations to use her body for her own pleasure and ends up on friendly terms with her assailants. The scene could be seen as the first real throwing down of the gauntlet by D'amato in an Emanuelle film, with the heroine taken into places she and we never imagined by her post-60s free love philosophising, and also there's the curious effect of Gemser's performance, or rather lack of one. She walks through the entire film as if sleepwalking, greeting all things good or bad with the same blank affectless nonchalance, a kind of erotic robot either without emotions or with them so deeply suppressed as to suggest some past trauma. There's something about D'Amato's vision of Emanuelle which is both a lure and a fright, as we're compelled by her freedom as much as appalled by her lack of passionate engagement with, well, anything (including sex, where she invariably just goes through the motions).
My suspicion is that D'Amato had very conflicted feelings about the sexual freedoms which arose in the post-60s consumer West, a fear and fascination that sex can lead not to ecstasy and freedom by dehumanisation and death. It is no mistake that he cuts from Prince Sanit's sexual philosophising about giving yourself over to pleasure to the death of the snake at the claws and teeth of the mongoose, the "petit mort" alluded to by the cutting.
Emanuelle in Bangkok also works as a kind of satirical critique of consumer tourism, with exotic backdrops being used as a sex-filled break (as so many Westerners have used the real Bangkok); yet the real world of politics and human jealousy keeps interrupting, exposing Emanuelle's travels as the banal escapism they really are. The plot, like homeless and rootless modern man, lurches from one country to the next, one meaningless encounter to another, one short-lived and doomed relationship to its successor and it is in this much criticised plotlessness that the film makes its point. D'amato frames the story with two episodes from the relationship between Emanuelle and her erstwhile lover Roberto (played by Gemser's real-life husband Gabriele Tinti), the first setting out the plan to enjoy each other for the time being but not get bogged down in ideas of fidelity and love, the last showing their dream ruined by his foul-mouthed jealous homophobia about her love for a young female artist; the idea seems to be that Emanuelle cannot escape from the old ways of possessiveness, male chauvinism and all that messy stuff, but she'll wander on regardless. What we are meant to make of all this D'Amato, like a true democrat, leaves entirely up to us
score 7/10
jaibo 26 March 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2043234/34976
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